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How Students Are 'Evolving' With Technology
Scott Jaschik writes "A new study explores how "digital natives" (today's college students) have changing technology habits — and how those habits have infiltrated the classroom. What does that mean for professors and their teaching methods?"
Maybe it's just me, but I've tried taking notes on my laptop before and I just didn't retain the information as well as when I physically write notes with paper and pencil.
You know, I love technology and all that it has done and is continuing to do, but I'm also starting to feel that technology is making a large portion of society very antisocial. When I was younger I used to enjoy going to the library, playing in the park etc., nowadays I see a huge portion of younger people skipping the libraries in favor of wikipedia or finding it online. Same goes for interaction, say dating... Why should someone head to a bar, coffeeshop, the laundrymat to meet someone when they could find it online. Alot of interaction has gone down the tubes and while it may be nice to think of an "e-classroom" of the future, I'd be pretty pissed if I couldn't clown around in person as opposed to faking smiles behind a screen. Screw that give me some dirty smelly kids, jokes, teachers throwing chalk at me versus a "digital classroom"
Infiltrated dot Net
I consider myself an early adopter and a person who's generally always interested in finding a competetive advantage, but one thing is for sure: when it comes to studying, I like to have something tactile in my hands. It's almost as though interacting with a paper medium is easier to deal with then a digital medium, and through that interaction I tend to learn more. It's why I've printed out all the Powerepoint slides to class and write on the slides in longhand rather then add notes on the actual slides themselves. I'm not sure if that's something that will eventuially change as people start becoming more exposed to computers at an early age, but I do believe that in my generation (college) people still generally prefer to have a non-digital medium for actual learning. I've rarely run into anyone who would rather read a digital textbook then have some sort of physical document/book in their hands.
Power is the ability to make a change.
That's not always true. I've seen a lot of professors who were able to capture the students' attention, and actually have them learn the material quite well, with only a blackboard and a piece of chalk. I've also seen a lot of professors with all this tricked out technology and completely fail at teaching, either by not getting the students interested, or completing failing at getting the point of the lecture across. So, while technology can help, especially if the professor understands it, I would say that the majority of professors who are bad, can't be helped by just throwing more technology at the problem. And professors who are already good, don't need high tech gadgets to teach.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
See, technology does has its advantages. Let's talk learning here. To me, when I was in school, there were two types of lectures, two types of classes, two types of professors/teachers. I could usually tell right away which type a particular class would be, and that would set the stage for me and eventually my final grade.
The two types:
- Rote memorization
- Conceptual learning
Back before google was a verb I couldn't just 'google' my question and get the answer within seconds. It was advantageous to use some of my (maybe a lot of it) on simple rote memorization.
But now, with so much information literally at my fingertips, I see no reason to fill as much of my memory up with the rote knowledge and facts. I feel that I am better served by learning the art of skepticism, philosophy, conceptualization, and the general techniques used to analyze, logically, the goings-on in my daily life.
I think that in today's schools, if they choose to embrace technology in this way, you will see that in this sense this is advantageous over not having the technology at all.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
This quote included in TFA is, I think, the best way to look at integrating new technologies with teaching: It's a truism that's pretty obvious, but bears repeating. In my opinion, technology can only enhance the teaching/learning experience, since good teachers will have the wisdom to deploy it carefully. Less skilled teachers will deploy it poorly (e.g. using it as a gimmick instead of an useful tool), but then again those are precisely the teachers that would be wasting student's time with other tools (chalkboards, textbooks, etc.).
This is not to say that there have not been "growing pains" with integrating technology into teaching. Certainly I've seen otherwise competent professors make mistakes with over-zealously deploying an immature teaching tool. But, overall, I think the unsurprising conclusion is that all these new technologies provide advantages to those who are smart enough to exploit them properly.
My general view is that rather than try to integrate specific technologies (which then become gimmick-like), it's best to simply make generic resources available to students and teachers (e.g. computer labs, Wi-Fi, laptop loaner programs, site-wide software licenses, etc.). When resources are available, students will inherently gravitate towards using them in the most useful ways. For example, rather than explicitly integrating a particular piece of tech into a course (a particular software package, forcing students to use an online message board, etc.), my inclination would be to make a bunch of avenues for learning available, and see which ones the students inherently use.
I was in the first class of engineers which my school required to have a computer. That was 20 years ago. I now live in that college town, and have occasional interaction with the engineering department and its students. (No, that's not what I meant - get your mind out of the gutter). They use computers for the same things I did - CAD, spreadsheets, term papers. They get more out of them through the internet as many professors put assignments, notes and samples on line. We didn't play too many games because there weren't many immersive ones, and we didn't surf because the internet did not exist then as it exists now. The web had not yet been created (by web, I mean HTML and browsers). We didn't chat, unless you count BBSs - which I don't. We didn't download music or videos - most PCs didn't have sound cards, video wasn't really possible on an 8086, and p0rn, even if it existed was not really a hot item at 320x240 (in a stunning 256 colors).
It seems that most of the progress has been in added functionality (as in more built-in functions - 3D solid cad, more rows/cols) and speed of processing. Everything else seems to be more about entertainment, whether its games, connectivity, or casual information (surfing). Students can amass more crap via downloads, but if you never print it out or look at it on the screen page-by-page it's just as bad as a Kinkos-printed set of notes where you watch the comb spine slowly yellow over the years. Actually, I suppose its worse - without that yellow spine in the bookcase to remind you that you have it, you don't even remember that lecture note set exists, buried in some sub-folder in you document directory.
IMHO very little has changed in 20 years on the teaching front. The critical component to education in the interactive ability of the teacher and student to work together. Web-enabled learning still tens to fall short, imho, and expanding class attendance through distance learning just reduces the opportunity to get everyone involved in the learning process.
Wait...I take part of that back - email does make a difference. Quick questions can be answered efficiently in an asynchronous manner that wasn't possible in my day (yes, we had voicemail, but couldn't copy the whole class). Still, it doesn't really scream "new teaching methods are necessary," unless new teaching methods involves putting web blocking software in the routers to keep the kids from surfing in a boring lecture.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The only subject I have trouble seeing easily transferable to an electronic form without some form of tablet would be math and engineering subjects which require extensive equations. There is no good standard equation editor that can create and manipulate formulas nearly as fast as can be done by hand afaik. (Although LaTeX equations do look a whole lot better than by hand once you get all the symbols in the right place.)
As an engineer I stuck to desktop computers, took notes on paper, until this year. I have a Ph.D., and my comittee consists of a colleague at work, my advisor at school, and me doing work at both work and school and home. So I broke down and I use it for research, but I still take paper notes. You just can't effectively do a free body diagram on a notebook...
I'm so glad that my eyes 'evolved' since my birth to allow me to read it on an LCD screen rather than the primitive CRT screens that my parents 'evolved' with. I guess my DNA got mangled about the same time that my fingers 'evolved' the ability to press little square buttons in order to produce this post.
In other news, I'm still awaiting the mutation that will allow me to 'evolve' the ability to let pop science jargon slip by unchallenged. I pray to God every day that to reach in with with His Noodly Appendage and screw with my chromosomes.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The idea is fairly old - Thomas Edison the inventor of the phonograph and co-inventor of movie films proposed commercializing education by recording the most charismatic teachers and showing them at schools. This supposedly would solve two cost problems: first you stimulate students with the best teachers; second you reduce the number of [expensive] teachers by replicating their presententions. EVERY TIME a new form of media was invented since Edison someone has proposed the same arguments for commercializing education- to this day, now with Internet text messaging and videos. To a small degree the InterNet has facilitated grade-school charter school and college-trade schools. It cuts the cost of classrooms, but not the labor costs of interactive teachers. There must be something fundamental about the interative give-and-take of teachers and students thats resisted change int the 2500 years since Plato's Academy.
I've found that if a lecturer isn't very good he's going to get worse if you give him Powerpoint.
The killer sentence is in the second paragraph
"Most students (60.9 percent) believe it improves their learning."
Most students also believe drinking 10 pints of beer and farting loudly is really funny and will improve their chances of getting laid....
What the students believe and what is actually true may be two completely different things. I should imagine most professors will turn round and ask to see proof that the technology really does improve student learning before adopting a different teaching methodology.
(disclaimer: I'm a university researcher working in technology and education)